Victorian Opera

The birth of a new opera is always exciting. Unlike a play or a sonata, an opera brings together a variety of art forms, with performers and creatives drawn from many different backgrounds. The libretto of Christopher Sainsbury’s The Visitors draws on a new, more gender-balanced version of an existing play, Jane Harrison’s The Visitors (2020), currently running in Sydney and Wollongong.

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Inspired by everything he had learned and seen at the Mannheim Court in 1777–78, Mozart, aged twenty-four, was primed when he received a commission to write an opera for the 1781 Munich carnival. His years in Mannheim had been formative, exposed as he was to Elector Carl Theodor’s court, which rivalled that of Frederick II, king of Prussia, in discrimination and cultivation.

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1843 was quite the year in Christmas lore. It can boast both the first Christmas cards, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, and the first edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Our passion for the former may have ebbed a little in the age of digital communication, but Dickens’s novella – albeit most commonly in one of its many theatrical adaptations – continues to draw our interest. Melbourne is currently hosting the Old Vic production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation at the Comedy Theatre (with David Wenham as Scrooge). Now it also has an opera première: composer Graeme Koehne and librettist Anna Goldsworthy’s version for Victorian Opera. ... (read more)

There are not too many parallels to be drawn between the House of Atreus and the House of Windsor, especially in these mournful times. But I could not help noticing one (admittedly tenuous) connection of memory and circumstance triggered by Victorian Opera’s powerful, almost magisterial one-off performance of Elektra and, later on at home, watching the procession of the Queen’s coffin down the Mall, from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall.

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For all its intense brevity, Salome is notoriously difficult to stage and perform. Richard Strauss might have adroitly described his opera (first performed in 1905) as ‘a scherzo with a fatal conclusion’, but his great admirer Gustav Mahler was closer to the mark when he said ‘deeply at work in it … is a live volcano, a subterranean fire’. Both points of view were more than justified by this generally fine performance of Salome.

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‘Victorian’ may have become for us a byword for hypocrisy and repression, but it’s not hard to find literature of the day that plays against this grain. The Victorian fairy tale is certainly one place where authors did find ways covertly to explore challenging social themes, albeit under the cover of the prescription ‘for children’.

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In this era of the jukebox musical, it is not surprising that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalent, the pasticcio opera, should be undergoing a revival. A couple of seasons ago, New York's Metropolitan Opera created a version, The Enchanted Island, which received a mainly ...

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In the argument over the programming of Broadway musicals by Australia’s opera companies, it is usually assumed that audiences know the difference between the two forms. But even superficial markers can be misleading. Bizet’s Carmen (1875) uses dialogue and song forms that are traditionally associated with the musical, but is classified as an

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Here is a fine new Australian opera from Victorian Opera. Composer Iain Grandage and librettist Alison Croggon have taken Tim Winton’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Riders (1994) and created a highly expressive work. Marion Potts directs it on a wide but stark stage furnished only with wooden saw horses. There is a balcony and a revolve, but mostly Potts chooses to observe her anguished and introspective characters through a series of fairly static groupings.

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